her arms wide again and yelled, spluttering, 'Well?
Seventy-two seconds elapsed.
Genar-Hofoen glanced at her. 'I always said I'd live once and then die,' he said. 'Never to be reborn, never to enter a simulation.' He shrugged and looked embarrassed. 'Intensity,' he said. 'You know; make the most of your one time.'
Ulver rolled her eyes. 'Yeah, I know,' she said. She'd met a lot of people her own age, mostly male, who felt this way. Some people reckoned to live riskier and therefore more interesting lives because they did back-up a recorded mind-state every so often, while other people — like Genar-Hofoen, obviously (they'd been together for so brief a time it wasn't something they'd got round to discussing yet) — believed that you were more likely to live your life that bit more vividly when you knew this was your one and only chance at it. She'd formed the impression this was the kind of thing people often said when they were young and then had second thoughts about as they got older. Personally Ulver had never had any time for this fashionable purist nonsense; she'd first decided she was going to live fully backed-up when she was eight. She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death — and she did feel a little admiration — but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.
She wondered whether she ought to mention that this might all be even more academic than they imagined; part of that referential knowledge she'd gained from the
Best not to say anything, she thought. Kinder not to. Sure had her heart thumping, though. She was surprised the others couldn't hear it.
No, of course they couldn't hear her heart; she could probably start talking out loud right now and it would take them all the time they had left in this world to react, they were so wrapped up staring meaningfully into each other's eyes.
Eighty-eight seconds elapsed.
VIII
There was not long now. The
The Excession's expansion was localised; centred on the
The GSV never really knew why it did what it did next; perhaps it was a kind of desperation at work born of its appreciation of its impending destruction, perhaps it meant it as an act of defiance, perhaps it was even something closer to an act of art. Whatever; it took the running up-date of its mind-state, the current version of the final signal it would ever send, the communication that would contain its soul, and transmitted it directly ahead, signalling it into the maelstrom.
Then the
At the same moment, the Excession's expanding boundary started to change. The ship split its attention between the macro-cosmic and the human-scale.
'How long have we got now?' Genar-Hofoen asked.
'Half a minute,' Amorphia replied.
The man's hands were on the table. He rolled his arms, letting his hands fall open. He gazed at Dajeil. 'I'm sorry,' he said.
She looked down, nodding.
He looked at Ulver, smiling sadly.
The
Then those twinned waves did the impossible; they went into reverse, retreating back towards the Excession's start-point at exactly the same rate as the
The GSV kept on slowing down, still finding it hard to believe it was going to live.
It watched the ridges on the surface of the grids as they retreated before it and slowly shrank. The rate of attenuation implied a zero-state at exactly the point the
IX
Dajeil looked up, tears in her eyes. «I-» she began.
'Wait,' the avatar said.
They all looked at it.
Ulver gave the creature what seemed to her like an extraordinarily long time to say something more. '
The avatar looked radiant. 'I think we may be all right after all,' it said, smiling.
There was silence for a moment. Then Ulver collapsed back dramatically in her seat, arms dangling towards